ALTHOUGH there has been an apparent decrease in the overall crime rate, there has been a rise in sexual offences.

Four women will be raped every single day in Scotland.

Correction. Four women will report they have been raped.

There will be too many others who won’t go to the police or even Rape Crisis because they cannot face the thought of reliving the assault or going to court, where they might not be believed and some sneering lawyer will tear them apart.

Meanwhile the number of teenage pregnancies, especially in more deprived areas, remains stubbornly high.

We have to give kids something better to aspire to than a pram when they’re hardly out of one themselves.

But I can just about understand that if there are no jobs and few hopes of one on the horizon, then motherhood could look like a sensible career choice.

Money for nothing and the benefits come free – until reality bites after the sleepless nights, lonely days and no spare cash kicks in.

This mindset, that a baby is somehow a passport to the good life, has to be changed.

But we also need better targeted sex education. And that target should be boys. Remember them?

We endlessly talk about and wring our hands over single mothers as if it didn’t take two to make a child.

But as Stephen Jardine wrote on Wednesday – and ta for the kind remarks Stephen – no one ever focuses properly on men.

They’re the ones whose behaviour and attitude towards women have to be challenged, not least when it comes to sex. And the earlier we do it, both in the home and at school, the better.

I am not just talking about showing them how to bung a condom on their willies, even if I did once suggest, semi-jokingly, that lads should be sewn into them at puberty.

We need an awful lot more than that.

Parents, especially fathers – another neglected species – as well as teachers, must start having serious conversations with boys about respecting girls and not treating them as objects of their over-active hormones and fantasies.

Because if we don’t, there is a very real danger they’ll carry these dangerous beliefs into their adult lives and that, I would argue, explains, if only in part, this increase in sexual crimes against women.

The internet, with its diet of filth and porn on tap doesn’t help, spewing out the hateful message that rape is something every woman wants and to which every male is entitled.

Look too at the chat rooms and blogs to see what an awful lot of men really think about women.

I’m not suggesting they’re all potential rapists but until we – and in particular men – start challenging other men about the way they casually use and abuse women, we’ll get nowhere.

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THOSE thugs who lifted £730,000 worth of bling in Edinburgh, deserved their 10 and 12-year sentences.

They didn’t only steal, they traumatised and assaulted the shop’s staff.

But you can’t help compare what they got with the measly few months Stuart Hall received for molesting 13 youngsters, one only nine years old.